Branching out with deep painterly Provincetown roots

Thursday

Jul 19, 2012 at 12:01 AMJul 19, 2012 at 7:11 PM

Laurence Young has deep connections with Provincetown. The painter has shown with Alden Gallery since it opened in 2007. His latest show, “Mixing It Up,” also featuring the work of Kevin Cyr and Mark Palmer, opens with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, July 20.

Deborah Minsky

Alden Gallery, founded by Howard Karren and Stephen Syta, occupies an important niche in the world of Provincetown art. Since they opened in November 2007 this gallery spotlights contemporary colorists whose work includes landscapes, still lifes and seascapes. From Friday, July 20 through Aug. 9, Alden will present acclaimed artist Laurence Young with Kevin Cyr and Mark Palmer. As press material indicates, this disparate trio will be “Mixing it Up” literally and figuratively as they offer a range of familiar yet renewed and reinvented imagery.

Laurence Young has deep connections with Provincetown. The painter has shown with Alden Gallery since it opened in 2007. His latest show, “Mixing It Up,” also featuring the work of Kevin Cyr and Mark Palmer, opens with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, July 20.

Young recently told the Banner that he first came to town already an accomplished oil pastelist and printmaker “in search of a mentor to learn how to paint” and found teacher Lois Griffel, who, after inheriting Henry Hensche’s Cape Cod School of Art continued the tradition of plein air painting and instruction initiated in Provincetown by Charles Hawthorne.

As Young describes meeting Griffel during the fall of 1981, “I made a visit to Lois’s studio on Pearl Street. [Finding] an instant kinship, we sat down on her studio floor talking for hours about art.” Young was an avid student who mastered plein-air but then decided he needed to branch out, to expand his mode of expression.

Through subsequent contact with artist Wolf Kahn, himself a former Hans Hofmann student, Young’s work “became more expansive as he began to reinterpret color as sweeping masses instead of notes of color.” He also moved on to a larger format as his work shifted.

His next big creative breakthrough came in 2007 after he moved permanently to Provincetown. He met painter Cynthia Packard, who introduced him to the cold wax process.

“Her use of cold wax medium in her oils, then stressed with heat was exciting,” he says. “The colors bled and bubbled, allowing her to scrape it back and then rebuild, creating rich surfaces. I was once again ignited and inspired to move my work to the next level.”

Alden Gallery co-owner Howard Karren says, “Working with cold wax process changed [Young’s] work dramatically, giving his paintings more depth and texture. With this process he has branched off in a very unique style.”

Working with cold wax and a blow torch, Young explains how inner surfaces are scraped out from the painting, revealing an inner depth or “history” of the canvas from its initial under painting. “All of this stuff is just scraped out from behind. I can scrape it back on to the canvas or take it away. I then can draw directly on the surface or scratch into it. Some of the process seems accidental, but the more I work with it, the easier it is to predict what is going to happen, how and where I am going to discover what I call ‘ghost images.’ The more wax you put in, the more translucent it can get. I already have three or four different spatial layers here. It builds up very nicely; I love the fact that I am sort of playing back and forth all the time.”

“I have been involved in the arts all my life but made a conscious decision 22 years ago to make art my full-time vocation,” Young says. “I sold my design business in New York City and set off to become the working artist I’ve always dreamed of being. As you can imagine, it involves sacrifices and an amazing amount of discipline. All the time I was creating art I was always looking for ways to market my work. I showed at banks, restaurants, any public place that would allow me to hang my paintings. I gave open studios in my home slowly building a mailing list and following. This was before the Internet and e-mail. Although I am now represented by a number of galleries, the diligence and discipline continue.”

Clearly Laurence Young has found his true home in Provincetown, and in so doing he has taken pains to give back to his adopted community and participate significantly in town life. He tends a summer plot at the B-Street community garden, volunteers as a cook for SKIP and, for a number of years, has helped out and donated art work to the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod’s annual Labor Day Auction, for which he designed this year’s logo and T-shirt.

Just the facts

What: “Mixing It Up,” work by Laurence Young, Kevin Cyr and Mark Palmer